Thanks to the persuasive powers of the Providence Student Union, a cohort of Rhode Island legislators, city officials, professors, and just plain old people locked themselves in a library for several hours and tortured themselves by taking a standardized test. Fingers cramped. Temples throbbed. Egos crumbled. It was an intellectual bloodbath.

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The test, a mélange of actual questions from the New England Common Assessment Program (NECAP, as in, the breaking thereof), didn't go over well. Adults complained of performing poorly, and some even mustered the temerity to say that the standardized test that the high school seniors of New England have to take was full of "trick questions."

The Providence Student Union organized the test-taking event as a protest against a new state requirement that high school seniors need to achieve a certain level of proficiency on the NECAP in order to graduate. The NECAP, however, wasn't designed for such a purpose. In fact, according to the Washington Post, it wasn't even designed to assess individual students.